Taranaki Both Barrels July 2017

Up for a challenge? Target pooks and pheasants

While the season for ducks and swan ended on Sunday 2nd July, pukeko can still be hunted in Taranaki until Sunday August 27, with a daily bag limit of 10 in Area C and 5 in Areas A & B.

Pooks can be wily birds that provides challenging shooting as they break from cover.

The best way to hunt them is to get a few dogs and hunting mates together and undertake a pukeko drive.

Their breast meat makes good eating, so please make good use of the birds you shoot.

Cock pheasant and California quail can also be hunted in Taranaki through to August 27.

Although quail populations are now very limited as a result of the loss of rough cover, hunters are reporting good success chasing pheasants in both Nukumaru and Harakeke Forest.

Hunters are reminded that they need an access permit for these forests, available from the Whanganui and New Plymouth Fish & Game offices.

Not surprisingly, the obvious areas have received a lot of pressure this season, so it’s worth looking for some tucked away corners that may have been overlooked.

Concentrate on sunny corners with open areas of lupin, inkweed and patches of grasses.

In this country, not every bird provides a shooting opportunity, however if a bird beats you once it will often use the same escape route next time, which with a bit of planning can lead to its undoing.

Similarly, once hunters get back into the less intensively farmed country with more scrub and rough fringe cover, then particularly along river flats and stream margins there can be reasonable numbers of pheasants in the Taranaki region.

This tends to be an underused opportunity and a good ploy can be to drive back country roads in the early morning or late evening at any time of year looking for obvious concentrations of birds.

Then go and knock on the nearest door seeking the landowner and possible permission to hunt.

Coastal sand country can provide some good pheasant hunting opportunities.

Reminder on duck band details

Please remember to send in any details of duck bands.

If you've successfully harvested a duck with a band on its leg, we need your help. This information is crucial to our research - so please provide as much detail as possible.

This is for our records only. You can fill out an on-line form here and submit it, or post your band details (not band) to: Fish & Game, Private Bag 3010, Rotorua 3046; or to the National Banding Office, PO Box 108, Wellington 6140.

Licence fees pay for duck research

Mallards have been in New Zealand for 150 years, but not nearly enough is known about them. That’s why Fish & Game embarked on a three-year research project to boost our knowledge of the country’s favourite game bird.

Key questions for the mallard telemetry (tracking) project have been: What is mallard productivity, what factors are affecting population growth rates, and what can managers do to better enhance our resource and increase duck numbers?

If you haven't read about the work by researcher Jenn Shepard and the team, click here.